Take that! Sort of. This was less a leaders’ debate than two leaders desperately and separately searching for the right tone. Trying to sound confident but not aggressive. A man of the people rather than of the polls. Warning against the risks of falling for the other bloke’s con tricks while promoting his own “positive’’ plan for the future.

It may require remarkable chutzpah for Kevin Rudd to declare his outrage at the lack of detail in the Opposition’s costings, for example. After Labor has failed so spectacularly to ever make its own budget sums add up, Kevin’s holier-than-Tony approach is a big stretch even for him. The official commitment to “a new way" rapidly changed into a more familiar style of attack.

But the Prime Minister was determined to use the first campaign debate to trap Abbott in an election dead end – the threat of massive spending cuts or an increased goods and services tax to pay for Coalition promises. Or into suggesting that the Opposition is even more reliant on dodgy numbers than Labor has proven itself to be.

Tony Abbott was equally determined to make this a test of Labor’s threadbare credibility – the hard evidence of the last six years rather than reassuring promises about what comes next.

It was effectively a dead draw in terms of either inspiring or scaring an audience watching from home. Both men were pretty flat in their presentation. And that means Rudd, as self-proclaimed “underdog’’, loses by not managing to assert a new momentum to propel him into this week’s campaign. His greatest skill – playing the nerdy but populist hero – didn’t really come off. The smile was largely missing in action.

But in this particular game of bluff, the main loser is always reality. The idea that either side can guarantee a semi-painless return to budget surplus a few years hence clearly belongs in economic fantasy land.

Quite apart from the little matter of an unpredictable global economy, Labor’s economic statement ahead of the campaign demonstrated how quickly many billions of dollars can disappear from the budget bottom line in just a few weeks.

The Treasury and Finance department outlook to be released on Tuesday will show more of the same – still relatively optimistic (if falling) revenue projections underpinning a poker-faced calm about the level of government spending.

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Not that Abbott wanted to sound too precise either about how it is possible to square community expectations on services and spending with the demand for budget discipline atop a sluggish economy.

He repeated that the details of Liberal policies and funding will be available in good time before September 7. Thus far and no further.

And even a bigger poll lead was never going to be sufficient to encourage great honesty about difficult choices to come from the Coalition as opposed to bad choices already made by Labor. The most important requirement for the man still on track to be Australia’s next Prime Minister is to avoid unexpected errors. He was happy to portray himself last night as Mr Reliable rather than Mr Excitement, while criticising Labor’s “embarrassing scare campaign" on issues like the GST and an alleged $70 billion budget hole.

So the general tone of the debate was always going to rely heavily on generalities from both men about their (not so grand) plans for the future interspersed with barbs about the other’s failings.

Rudd’s emphasis was that only Labor can be trusted to guide the country’s adaptation to a post-China resources boom world, including making the necessary investments in areas like education and broadband.

“We must prepare for this great economic transition,’’ he declared firmly.

This “diversification’’ supposedly includes new jobs in manufacturing, agribusiness and service industries. Details of these future jobs still to come. Who mentioned auto industry handouts?.

Abbott couldn’t quite contain his frustration.

“He said almost exactly the same thing six years [ago] – and the trouble is we just have the same waffle today,’’ he said.

“If the mining boom is over, at least in part it’s because Mr Rudd’s government has killed it.’’

Well, it’s rather more complicated than that.

But Rudd, as ever, politely ignored the three-year contribution of the Gillard government. His basic proposition is for a form of national amnesia about his predecessor – and to a lesser degree, much of his own first term in office. Certainly to the extent of making any connection between Labor then and Labor now. He still wants to be the new challenger.

“Economic wisdom lies not in cutting things to the bone,’’ he insisted, citing the current weakness in the economy and problems down the track from not investing in productivity-boosting infrastructure like the national broadband network.

And just to be sure that he wasn’t leaving anyone out, the Prime Minister expressed mild-mannered concern that the Liberals’ proposed company tax cut and abolition of the mining tax seemed to favour big companies and the mining industry ahead of “families".

(Apparently, “working families’’ belonged to the 2007 era and “modern families’’ to 2010. In 2013, we are all apparently just families, happy or otherwise.)

Abbott was, meanwhile, trying to persuade the audience that old and grey is the real new way, arguing that the Coalition had had “the same clear plan for three years", and the same team in place. Mark it as politics – and debate – by default.